Category: Linux Mint

Chrome for Linux Mint 18 installed from scratch. There are two ways you can install Chrome for Linux Mint 18. One way is to do it the traditional way of downloading an installer file and run it. The other way is to use Terminal to download and install it the usual Linux way. Let us see how we do it both ways.

Install Chrome for Linux Mint 18 from a web browser

The first thing we need to do is to find the Chrome install file. Open your browser and go to (https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/desktop/index.html). Or open Google and search for Chrome. The first page you will find is the Google Chrome page. Since you are doing this from a Linux computer, Google knows you are looking for a Linux version of Chrome.

Google will now ask you what kind of package you want to download. If you want 64 bit .deb or 64 bit .rpm. You need to select the .deb package. That is for Debian and Ubuntu. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu (which is based on Debian). Fedora (or Red Hat) and OpenSUSE have a completely different package system, so don’t choose that one. Then click ACCEPT AND INSTALL.

Linux Mint will now ask what your browser should do with the file you downloaded. It will normally suggest to open it with GDebi. That is the standard package installer in Linux Mint. Just go ahead and click OK.

The package installer will then check if all dependencies are present. If you installed Linux Mint the normal way, that should be ok. Click Install Package and the installation will begin. Once the package is installed, click Close to close the installer window.

Now Chrome for Linux Mint 18 is installed on your system and ready to use. That is one way of doing it. Let us see how to install it from the Terminal window.

Install Chrome for Linux Mint 18 from Terminal

No point in installing a web browser if you only have terminal access. Even tho there is a text-based web browser, Google Chrome is not one of them. However, if you are like me, you probably prefer working in Terminal over the Desktop. I feel more in control when using Terminal.

The first thing you need is to log in to root.

sudo su

Then we need to add the Google Chrome repository to our sources list. We do that like this.

After doing changes to the repositories and source list we need to update the package manager.

apt-get update

When the updating is done it is time to install Chrome for Linux Mint 18. The name of the package is google-chrome-stable. So we install that by:

apt-get install google-chrome-stable

Now the Chrome browser is installed on your system, and ready to use.

Bonus tip

Chrome is a good web browser. I used it as my primary web browser when I was using Windows. You might want to try out a web browser called Chromium. It is like Google Chrome because this is where Chrome gets it source code from. Chromium is, just like Chrome is a project run by Google.

The package name of the Chromium browser is chromium-browser. And is part of the Mint repository, so no need to change the sources and add public keys. Just do the installation by running this command.

apt-get install chromium-browser

Chromium is now ready on your system. That is how you install Chrome for Linux Mint 18, or even Chromium. Enjoy!

linux mint default password

Since you are looking for Linux Mint default password I assume you are using the Ubuntu version of Linux Mint. And you are trying to access the root user. Normally you can do everything from your own user using the sudo command. But there are downsides to sudo. And there is no Linux Mint default password. And if you need to login as root. Here is how you do it.

Open a terminal window, and type:sudo passwd root

Then you should be able to set a password to your root account. But be careful when login in as root. And don’t use it as your normal user account. Only when needed. And not to browse the internet.

The same method can be used if you have forgotten your root password. But you can only do it from a user that is a member of the sudo group. That is a member that can use the sudo command.

So this is a workaround Linux Mint default password. Since there isn’t any.

If you need to download Linux Mint, please go to their official web page.

Disable directory browsing

If you have directory browsing enabled, which it is by default, your users can browse the directories on your web server. This is not particularly good regarding security. So we better disable directory browsing to be on the safe side.

On a Debian server we do that quite easily in the domain config at /etc/apache2/sites-available/
If you have setup more than one domain on your web server, you should go to your domains config file. Here is an example: ‹/etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com.conf
(if you use Apache prior to 2.4 you might not have the .conf extension)

Insert this line into the config file: Options -Indexes

If you only have one domain hosted on your server, you most likely uses the default domain config.
Edit this file: /etc/apache2/sites-available/default
Look for the line: Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews ExecCGI
And change to: Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews ExecCGI

You can now restart or reload your apache server.service apache2 restart

Apt-get remove is not always enough to remove a package completely. If you try to remove in example the mysql-server package with just apt-get remove, the settings and lot of dependencies will still be left. We will need to purge and clean up. Here is a short desription on how to perform a complete removal of mysql-server with settings and everything.

First you need to run the remove –purge command.
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apt-get remove –purge mysql\*
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Next step is probably not recommended by debian.org as it will increase their bandwith (unless you run your own apt-get cache server, which I recommend everyone to do). That is to clean the package cache.apt-get clean

The last step is often forgotten, included by my self. That is to update the file database. Else references to all the deleted files will still be present.updatedb

USB drives is a good way of extracting large amounts of data from your servers quickly. And of course a lot of other things. There are a few things to notice. The file system of your hard drive. If it is supported by Linux you don´t need to format it. You can go ahead and just mount it.

The scenario. You need to backup a lot of data from your linux server. And the drive is formatted as fat32.

After the disk is connected to a usb port you need to find the drive letter (ex: sdb)
Sudo or sufdisk -l
This will give you information about all your connected drives. Not just USB drives.

Before mounting the drive, we need to create a folder for the USB drive. Since it´s a backup drive, we call it backup.mkdir /backup

Once you found the drive letter you can mount the drive.mount -t auto /dev/sdb /backup

If you reboot the drive will be unmounted.
To make it stick after reboot, check out my post here. You can also just run the mount command if you only need now and then.

Always handy with a web based database tool. Here is how to install and access PhpPgAdmin on a Debian variant.

First to install the package.apt-get install phppgadmin

Now your web panel is installed. Then you need to access it. If you are on a different computer than you install the PhpPgAdmin you will need to edit the config file to be able to access it. Here is what you need to do.

Comment out the line 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 allow from :: 1/128
And uncomment the line allow from all

Now you need to set a password for the root user. PostgreeSQL call the root user for postgres.
So no need to either su or sudo the postgres user.sudo -u postgres psql (or su postgres, then start psql)

Inside the postgree database type this to set a password\password
Enter the password twice as usual\q
To quit.

Now you have set a password for the root user and made it accessible from everywhere.
I have installed it on 192.168.1.86, so I would need to type into my web browser192.168.1.86/phppgadmin

Now use the postgres as user, and enter with your password. You might want to consider to restrict access to your database once everything is set up.

PostgreSQL, another popular sql database server. Here is how to install one in Debian (and Debian variants). However during the Debian installation if you select Database Server, PostgreSQL will be installed by default. If you didn’t select any database servers, here is how to install PostgreSQL after Debian installation is done.

I prefer using a gui when controlling my virtual machines. Learning how to control them in the most basic way from the command line or terminal is easy. It is very self explanatory once you know about the virsh command. I have made some examples below on how to use these commands.

Here is the list of basic commands to start, stop and reboot your virtual machines.

When copying very large files it is sometimes frustrating not having a progress bar. Have the process crashed? or etc…
I´ve tried rsync and various other options, but the most efficient way I found is to use Midnight Commander (mc).

First we need to install it (assuming root or sudo)apt-get install mc

To start it, just type mc <enter>
If you have used any file manager tool before, this should be really familiar. You have two panes, and you chose your self what is destination and what is source. If will copy from the pane that is currently active to the other one. Anyway, the copy function in MC will show you a progress bar and seems to be quicker than some of the other methods around.

This is useful for me when editing my ip ban script. I use the same text file to ban ip´s and sometimes that file is pretty big. A simple method to clear the content of the file without touching the permissions and ownerships. We just copy the dev null device content into the file you want to clear. We do that like this: